[0:02]The suspect was found dead inside of a New Hampshire storage facility earlier tonight with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Just moments ago, officials said that they believe this person was also responsible for the murder of an MIT professor two days after that brown
[0:18]shooting. Take a listen. Federal agents breached a storage locker in Salem, New Hampshire, in search of Claudio Neves Valente, a Portuguese national. We believed shot and killed two Brown University
[0:34]students and an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts. MSNOW investigative reporter Mark Santia joins me now. Mark, thanks so much for joining me. What else do we know about the suspect and what happened this evening?
[0:50]Yeah, I want to give you a live look what's happening behind me. This is still a very active scene. Evidence response team from the FBI. They're here collecting clues. At this point, they do not have a motive. This is what we know. Investigators say the suspect in the Brown University
[1:04]mass shooting has been found dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound right there in the storage facility in New Hampshire. He's believed to have taken his own life tonight. Police have identified him as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48 years old, a former student at
[1:18]Brown University. He was enrolled only in physics classes for a masters of science PhD program in physics. He started at Brown September 1st, 2000. He took a leaf of absence April 2001 before formally
[1:32]withdrawing July 31st, 2003. Now physics classes are held in the Barrison Holly building. That is where Valente opened fire last Saturday, killing two students and wounding nine others. Valente, according to investigators
[1:46]was a Portuguese national. His last known address was in Miami, Florida. The FBI says they are still working to determine a motive why he targeted students who were preparing for finals inside the engineering building at Brown University. Police say tracking the
[2:03]killer was a combination of high tech policing and old fashioned police work. A license plate reader hit on the plate. Detectives and agents followed the leads to a rental car location. They pulled video and that was the break in the case. They say police found the rental car right here in New
[2:19]Hampshire. Now also tonight, investigators are telling us Valente after the shooting, after committing the shooting at Brown, then drove to Massachusetts, where he killed an MIT professor in his home. Two days later, they're now looking to see if the same rental car was at both locations.
[2:35]They're verifying that again, there's a lot of work that still needs to be done, but they say Valente after the shooting at Brown, then drove to Massachusetts where he killed a professor who was working at MIT officers and agents. Again, the FBI's ERT emergency response team,
[2:50]they are here. They're going in and out of the storage facility. They're working to get more answers, namely at this point, they say they do not have a motive. They do not know what caused Valente to go on this violent spree.
[3:04]We'll send it back to you. Mark, what do we know about the connection between this suspect and the victim at MIT? Yeah, we're still working that out right now.
[3:17]We're still waiting to hear more. There's a lot of ballistics. There's a lot of tests that need to go through. And again, there were a couple of, there were two press conferences. So we're waiting to hear exactly what the connection was. What we know is we still don't have a motive as to what put him on that violent spree, the mass shooting
[3:34]at Brown, and then the murder of the MIT professor. According to investigators, they are still working for a motive. We heard during that press conference that it's believed that the MIT professor and the suspect went to
[3:48]school together back in Portugal. Is that right? That's what, that's what was said at the press conference. He has said, again, we don't know if they had had contact. We know his last known residence, Valente's last known residence was in Florida.
[4:05]We're not sure about how recent any contact was that he may have had with the MIT professor. We're still learning a lot right now. We don't know. And investigators said they don't know why he opened fire inside Barrison Holly, inside that
[4:18]engineering building. They know he took classes there. They don't believe he specifically targeted any student. They believe he obviously was familiar with the campus, familiar with that building, but they don't believe he had any right, any relationship,
[4:32]any knowledge of the students. They still at this point, don't know why he chose to open fire in the classroom there at Barrison Holly on the campus of Brown. Again, they're still developing several leads.
[4:47]They believe that he went to school with the MIT professor who investigators say he drove to his home and killed him. It killed him in Massachusetts two days after the shooting in Brown. They believe they went to school together at some point, but again, they don't know if they
[5:00]had any contact recently. So there's a lot of work still that needs to be done. Mark, thanks so much for your insights. For more, I want to bring in Rob D'Amico, MSNOW,
[5:15]National Security and Intelligence Analyst. He is also a former FBI supervisor and founder of Sierra One Consulting and former U.S. Attorney, Joyce Vance, who spent 25 years as a federal prosecutor. Thanks to you both.
[5:27]Rob, what is your take on everything that we've learned tonight about this suspect? I think you're seeing two facets of an investigation. One is a priority of trying to find out who it is and stop it.
[5:42]And that's what happened. And then now you're getting all the questions of, why did he do it? And that's going to come later on, because the most important thing is to figure out who it was to get him in custody.
[5:57]And obviously in this case, he took his own life. But one tip led him to it. And again, the investigation was going to, you know, you're investigating to try to find a motive to figure out who it was. But once you get that one tip that you want to follow
[6:12]on and then it doesn't really matter motive until after. So I think that's what's going on here is everyone kind of wants to know why. And investigators don't. They got a tip. They followed up on it. It led to the subject who took his own life and he ended it.
[6:31]And now they're going to go back and take the time to figure out why he did it. Joyce, was there anything in the arrest warrant for this suspect that sticks out to you? You know, all of this information comes at us really quickly.
[6:46]And the point that Rob's making is the important one. That's what I looked for first in the affidavit. Is the public safe? Is there any reason to believe that there's an additional threat? Was there possibly a co-conspirator? Was the storage unit used as a bomb making facility
[7:02]or did it hold explosive? There's every indication at this point that that none of that is the case, that the risk to the public has been ameliorated. We're told in this press conference conducted by the U S attorney in Boston, Lea Foley, who, you know,
[7:18]it's worth pointing out as a career prosecutor, lots of experience, handled the questions well, was very committed to transparency. She says, there's nothing in that storage facility. There's a backpack that they've recovered. They have a search warrant so they can look thoroughly.
[7:34]And she committed that they would be, that they would be transparent and share the results of that return once the search is completed. So law enforcement seems pretty confident tonight that there's no further risk to the public.
[7:48]And then as Rob says, they'll start to look for a motive. We don't get a lot of that out of the affidavit. There's some clear linkage, a possibility that this victim, the MIT professor went to school with the shooter. We don't know how long ago, that was, or if there's
[8:05]something more recent that set it off because the shooter apparently left Brown more than 20 years ago. So the question that they'll be pursuing is what happened more recently to trigger this incident. Rob, what do we know about how
[8:21]they ultimately track down this suspect given that there were several days when it seems like we didn't know where things were headed? It always happens to be one tip. And it's like when I was doing fugitives,
[8:34]it was always that one phone call. And then, you know, you never wanted like your fugitive beyond America's most wanted because you spent all that weekend running down leads, but those leads like lead to the person and it's,
[8:48]it's that one thing. So they put out the video or the picture of the one person they want to talk to that they thought had some type of connection or knowledge of this person. And it led to a rental car.
[9:01]And once you get the rental car, you get the license plate and then it just tracks on because once you get a license plate, there's tons of license plate readers out there. So that's, that's, and then it's also connected to the MIT shooting. So it's, it's that one tip that
[9:15]they're waiting for. The more information that they can feed to the public, they understand that that tip's going to come in. They just have to be able to pursue it. They had enough people on it and then they just, they got the tip and they ran with it and it led
[9:31]to this, this conclusion. Joyce, it was kind of striking that this tip initially came from a Reddit post. How common is that? I mean, this, this feels, uh, very contemporary, I guess, as, as these investigations go.
[9:48]You know, it does. And that suggests how careful I believe this was developed, um, by, uh, local police in Rhode Island, but all of law enforcement, federal state and local would have been combing the
[10:03]internet along with live sources, looking at all of the video that they were able to acquire, acquire. And ultimately they find an individual who had a conversation with the person that they believed was their shooter.
[10:16]They find that individual, they talk with that person to determine whether or not they're involved in the crime. And what they get out of that is a license plate, apparently an expired or a, or an unregistered license plate,
[10:29]a main state tag. So it doesn't stick out a lot in Rhode Island, but enough that they're able to pull it pretty easily off of one of the card readers. And that is, as Rob says, that's the one tip that makes the case is what,
[10:44]which is what you're always looking for in a situation like this, where you need to identify someone. There is always someone in the community who has seen something it's critical to make contact with that person, whether it's this sort of new mode of searching
[11:00]Reddit or other social media platforms, which is what panned out for law enforcement here, or whether it's more traditional law enforcement work, you've got to cover all of the bases. Rob, another thing that was striking about that press conference was that they mentioned that there were multiple license plates.
[11:16]It sounded like the suspect did something to their phone or got some sort of special phone that was harder to trace. There were other measures that seem to have been taken in advance to make it harder to find this
[11:29]particular suspect. What does that tell you about the level of sophistication of this person who is now dead of an alleged self-inflicted gunshot wound? How much premeditation went into all of this?
[11:44]There's a ton of premeditation. I think when you look back on his history with the victims, you're going to see more. There's so much on the internet of how to make
[12:01]yourself anonymous on things, both phone in real life on internet. Unfortunately, it's out there that all that information, how to be anonymous online, how to obscure your phone from collection of things.
[12:17]You can even buy phones that really don't leak data like the other ones do. Unfortunately, it makes law enforcement tougher. You're constantly fighting with those folks. If you get into the cyber world, it even gets so much more
[12:32]complex on how they do it. But law enforcement is staying with it. Again, it is one tip, a license plate. It's physical. It's something that we see that we have license plate readers out there that police, that's why people
[12:46]join the police department. They love to investigate that they get that one tip and then they follow it through and they figure out, OK, this is a dead end. What else is the next lead in that if I get a dead end here?
[13:02]And that's unfortunately, that's a fun part of law enforcement. That's why you join it, because the people that are out there, they know the other ways that the bad guys are trying to to hide. And you just constantly follow that lead.
[13:17]And again, it's not about it's about never giving up in law enforcement. And that's why we we always catch them. And, you know, it may take a little bit, but we always do catch them. So, Rob, obviously, this suspect has taken his
[13:31]own life at this point. There is no one to interrogate, to interview about what the motive was. So how would investigators go about cobbling together a theory about the motive behind these horrible crimes?
[13:51]So now we get into electronics, we take his phone. We if it's locked, we send it down to Quantico. And no matter what kind of phone it is, they're going to get into it. And they're going to the big thing is like encrypted chats. They're going to get into his encrypted chats, you know,
[14:07]signal WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, all those apps that they communicate on. You're going to get into his email. You're going to find out what his username were in other, you know, chat groups and everything else. And they're going to piece it together.
[14:21]Again, this is what people do. Like some of the great intelligence analysts out there, they start digging this stuff up and they find out this person was identified through an email, a cell phone, whatever type of thing that they can connect to.
[14:37]They're going to find him in all kinds of chat groups and talking to other people. Emails deleted like you can take a laptop and you think you deleted it. You didn't delete anything. They're going to find it. So anything he wrote on that laptop, all those electronics,
[14:51]you're going to figure out where he lived. They're going to do search warrants on all that. And they're going to get it and they're going to start putting it together and they're going to figure out kind of what his his thing was based on what he was communicating to other people. Joyce, before we let you go, we also learned this evening
[15:09]that a federal jury in Wisconsin found Judge Hannah Dugan guilty of obstructing ICE agents from making an arrest of an undocumented immigrant. She was also found not guilty of concealing a person from arrest and has vowed to appeal. What's your reaction to this verdict tonight?
[15:26]Well, this jury has spoken. It's a unanimous jury that chose to convict her on the second count in the indictment, charging her with obstruction of justice. The next step, of course, will be an appeal. The district judge in this case rejected Judge Dugan's motion,
[15:43]asking him to dismiss the complaint of the indictment against her because she had judicial immunity, which I suspect will be the focus of the appeal. There's a strong doctrine that says that judges who are exercising their judicial function
[15:59]are immune from lawsuits because we want judges to be able to go about their business without fear of lawsuits. But it's not at all clear that it will apply here. That doctrine has very clear application in civil cases. This is, of course, a criminal prosecution
[16:16]that will take some time to go to appeal and to be resolved by the courts. Trump administration bracing tonight for the deadline tomorrow to release the Epstein files. The date weighs heavily on Donald Trump and the Bondi Justice Department.
[16:30]They have known this was coming. You can imagine it circled on their calendars as well. And they've known since Trump lost his bid to stop Congress from making the Epstein document release law, meaning it's not up to them anymore. This week, meanwhile, has featured more Epstein
[16:46]pressure on Trump, his top aide saying he's in the files while trying to downplay his actual potential links to any Epstein crimes. Trump's number two at the FBI announcing that he is leaving and announcing that right before tomorrow's deadline.
[17:02]Notable timing for an official who claimed he would get the files released, but did not. A new investigative report today has come out on about how Epstein and Trump bonded over the pursuit of women. More on that in a moment. Congress also keeping the pressure up on the Trump DOJ
[17:17]by releasing new Epstein evidence today, which follows on what it had done last week. They have been parceling this out. And Congress is stressing that they have a bipartisan push to make Trump comply with a range of warnings about consequences if they don't from taking bond to court,
[17:34]which could drag this story and this Trump debacle well in the next year to even considering impeaching Trump if they defy the law and compliance tomorrow. That would be over any illegal refusal to follow this law
[17:48]that he literally signed. It would be shocking if now they don't comply. Impeachment is possible depending on how egregious it is for Pandya. And Susan Walz has already said she whiffed and made a mess of it. We would explore the inherent power of contempt
[18:03]that Congress has. But there also is the strong possibility of prosecution for obstruction of justice. You heard it there, contempt, obstruction of justice, which you can get in trouble for, and of course,
[18:17]possible impeachment. The point is at which door they will open and when, but that they are already in contrast to how Democrats sometimes sound. They're already planning for everything and planning for what would be the worst.
[18:32]If the president refuses to follow a law he just signed, they will go at everyone. And those different roads also matter. We can discuss this more if it happens tomorrow, if they aren't turning over the required documents. But it matters because while the president is famously immune from later criminal
[18:47]sanction for official acts by the Supreme Court, his aides are not. People who work at the DOJ are not. Whether people are leaving, as I mentioned, related to this or other things, only time will tell. But if you stay and break the law while at the DOJ, it can end more than
[19:02]your career. It could end even your freedom. Then there's the new explosive report I mentioned from the Times, which probes Trump's relationship with Epstein, a, quote, best friend, and how they bonded over the pursuit of women.
[19:16]This new account draws on receipts and evidence from that era, just as Trump's birthday card for Epstein, which referenced secrets and women, was contemporaneous. It's credible evidence from at the time, which is part of why that birthday card
[19:29]story was a big deal. Trump's suing the journal over that reporting and they're pushing back and saying they expect to be vindicated in court. Well, I mentioned that evidence, which matters because today's new article has more evidence, like handwritten notes from all the way back to 1994,
[19:46]kept by Epstein's assistant, which the Times corroborated, the assistant noting at the time Trump was a regular presence in Epstein's life. Another employee noting the two talked at least three times a week in that period of their friendship of the mid and late 90s.
[20:01]That's a lot of contact. It adds to the questions about Trump's contradictions and secrecy about what he knew and when he knitted, when he, I should say, knew it with all this information coming out. Interviews in public records have reinforced
[20:14]how the two men socialized. Some of that, of course, was known well before this article. The assistant indicating Trump seemed to enjoy regaling Epstein with tales of his sexual exploits. Epstein seemed to delight in how uncomfortable it made his assistant to overhear them
[20:31]or have to hear them if that was part of the job. Another Epstein employee said, quote, Trump would occasionally send over modeling cards for Epstein to peruse like a menu. Raising questions about who knew what was the intention
[20:46]with those so-called cards. Now, the article has accounts of Epstein arranging for underage models to come socialize with adults, mentions parties where they were illegally offered alcohol. Epstein himself was not seen as a drinker.
[21:03]And the report in the Times does not accuse Trump of involvement in Epstein's crimes. It also notes that the women quoted in the new article did not accuse Trump of unlawful actions. And that's important to know. You have to look at all the facts, reporting
[21:16]and allegations. And in a period of major allegations, some proven against Epstein, the fact that the Times talked to people who did not accuse Trump is relevant if you want the whole context of that story.
[21:30]That is the reporting that refers to some of the women, as well as perhaps underage women, that were in Epstein's circle or recruited for it at the time. But while that's the Times article, we can also note in context other women have accused Trump of
[21:44]improper conduct, including E. Jean Carroll, who won two civil judgments, ultimately over 80 million dollars, upheld by an appeals court. I can tell you the United States Supreme Court is currently considering whether to hear that appeal, which
[22:00]would be Trump's last chance to potentially change or interfere with it. But as of this hour, under our courts of law, including the appeals court, they found Carroll to be the winner. And there are other accounts that you've probably heard
[22:15]of regarding allegations against Donald Trump. So you have the allegations and questions swirling over all of this. Some remain about Trump personally, but we can go well beyond his own personal liability in the Trump-Epstein relationship, which you see here.
[22:31]There's the broader case timeline, and the documents due tomorrow can shine light on Epstein's long history of aiding justice, which we've been charting. So that could implicate Donald Trump not only with what he did or didn't do in the 90s, and whether it's embarrassing or not or worse, but what he has done
[22:48]recently overseeing his DOJ and cabinet, as well as other administrations and potentially the Biden era secrecy. These documents certainly did not come out and were not provided to survivors when Merrick Garland was attorney general.
[23:02]The documents tomorrow could also tell us more things, since we don't know what's in them. We don't know what could be in them and what it could affect. Bottom line, with so much pressure building, the due day remains tomorrow. I'm joined by the New York Times Magazine's Emily
[23:16]Bazelon and Julie K. Brown, the investigative journalist with the Miami Herald, is one of the foremost experts on this story. Her book, "Proversion of Justice, the Jeffrey Epstein Story," and her Miami Herald reporting has been credited by survivors and experts as pivotal in this
[23:33]story. Welcome to both of you. Julie, your view on what tomorrow's documents could provide? Well, hopefully they'll give us more insight into what the FBI knew, what they did, how many of these victims came forward.
[23:50]We're not just talking about back in Palm Beach in 2005, 2006, but over the years. I know from my sources, some of these victims' lawyers, that there were many victims that came to the FBI in the ensuing years to tell them stories of
[24:08]abuse. So we'll get a better feel for how many victims there are, at least those that went to authorities, and what, if anything, the FBI and federal prosecutors did over many years of this case was
[24:24]investigated or supposed to be investigated. Emily? Yeah, and that's exactly, Julie's right, the place to start. And then I think once we have some sense of that aspect of the materials, the number of victims, what they
[24:39]told the FBI, then we can stack that up against what we know happened, which was this sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein, which Julie has reported, obviously, and the lack of prosecutions of anyone else. And it'll be easier to judge what the public thinks
[24:57]about those outcomes when we know what the FBI had their hands on. Yeah, and Emily, this reporting in The Times, your colleagues worked on, is striking. It discusses an Epstein accuser saying Epstein coerced her into attending four separate
[25:11]parties at Epstein's home. And Trump was at all four. At two of them, she says Epstein directed her to have sex with male guests, that that was the sort of expected arrangement or pressure. Also reading from the article, the relationship
[25:26]between Epstein and Trump, riddled with undertones of envy and disdain, Epstein seemed to hold a low opinion of his friend's business acumen, according to former employees and others who knew him. The article suggests that there was a kind of intense
[25:41]bond here, more so than maybe Epstein had with some other men or other business associates. Why could that matter, Emily? Yeah, that's a great question. I also took from this article by my colleagues, a sense of intimacy and closeness between
[25:54]the two of them. Trump, according to Epstein's brother and other sources, regularly, repeatedly going to Epstein's house, which Trump has said he didn't do. So you're kind of filling in the details of this relationship.
[26:08]It feels close. And then there's a question of whether Trump ever crossed a line himself, which I don't think we have evidence of. But then, and I mean in terms of women who are underage or other people who are being trafficked.
[26:24]But then I think also, what did he know about? What was he seeing? It seems like things were happening when he was present. And that's different from doing it yourself, obviously, but maybe we'll have some better sense of that from these files.
[26:38]Right. And Julie, I mentioned that the president in the first term was in charge of the DOJ. So we know from material that's come out how furiously Epstein was both lobbying, formally, individuals and high-priced
[26:53]Republican lawyers, but also informally with Steve Bannon and other people around Trump, that Epstein, rightly or wrongly, believed that he had various levers to pull so he could get away with it all. How does that correspond to what we might learn
[27:09]tomorrow or what the documents could hold about Trump's level of knowledge or intimacy with this individual as, at a later chapter in their life, the government is supposed to deal with this individual without fear or favor? Well, I think one of the other things beyond the fact
[27:26]that they apparently had a pretty good friendship, one of the things that I would hope that they've investigated or they will investigate is the modeling aspect of this. We have new reporting that's coming out about emails
[27:41]that have -- new emails that have come forward. And one of them, by the way, is in the tranche of photographs that was released today by the Oversight Committee, which indicates that there were people out there who were recruiting under the guise sometimes
[27:59]of models or assistants, and that they were actually getting girls, and girls was the word they used, for Epstein. And there's evidence in a lot of the newer emails that we've received that show that he was perhaps -- Epstein perhaps was using
[28:16]his modeling agency as a front for sex trafficking. It's desperate times, desperate measures for an increasingly desperate president. In a primetime address last night, bearing the tone, tenor, and volume of a person shouting into a bullhorn on a street corner, Donald Trump all but told
[28:32]the American people to pipe down and listen to how good they've got it under Donald Trump. He had everything we've come to expect from any one of his campaign rallies, overstatements, understatements, mathematical impossibilities, deep-seated grievances, and through it all, lies, lies, and more
[28:51]outrageous lies, entirely absent in contrast with the words Medicare, Medicaid, guns, debt, climate, Venezuela, bipartisanship, healing, uniting. In fact, Trump's tirade was nearly indistinguishable from what you might find on his true social feed.
[29:08]It lacked any major policy announcement other than distribution of so-called warrior dividends. It's something Defense One today identifies as a bit of a rebrand for a troop housing subsidy already approved by Congress. And Trump said he'd pay for those bonuses with
[29:25]revenue raised from tariffs, the fate of tariffs is currently before the United States Supreme Court. Friend of this program, Tom Nichols in the Atlantic today writes that the announcement of that bonus was a low character attempt to buy the loyalty of
[29:39]our beloved men and women in the armed forces. Quote, "We could take apart Trump's fake facts as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days, but perhaps more important than false statements, which for Trump are par for the course, was his demeanor.
[29:55]Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he's doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns?
[30:09]Shut up, you fools. The economy is doing fine. And if it isn't, it's not his fault. It's Joe Biden's." And on that final point, Trump already the blame game world champ outdid himself last night, nearly one
[30:21]year into his term. And this is a taste of what the speech sounded like. Good evening, America. Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, a Democrat administration. This is what the Biden administration allowed
[30:36]to happen to our country. Do you remember when Joe Biden, the last administration and their allies in Congress under the Biden administration, Democrat politicians under Biden, in the steep increase in premiums being demanded
[30:50]by the Democrats. And it's their fault. It is not the Republicans' fault. It's the Democrats' fault. And the Democrat party, the radical left Democrats, 30 to 100 percent under Biden. The Democrat inflation disaster, $15,000 under Democrat rule.
[31:09]The worst thing that the Biden administration did to our country. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. God bless you all. The guy needs to be in like a support group with the rest of us who miss the last normal president.
[31:28]Infinitely more important now for our purposes, the man who gave that speech last night, more important than him and anything he said or did or how he said and did it, were the people he was addressing, the American people, than how the American people say they feel right now.
[31:44]According to the latest polling from NPR, PBS and Marist, 57 percent of all Americans feel, quote, pessimistic about what is ahead for the world next year compared to 43 percent who feel optimistic. Those numbers were almost exactly flipped one
[32:00]year ago when, not for nothing, Joe Biden was president. NPR points this out, quote, 70 percent in the survey said the area where they live is not very affordable or not affordable at all for an average family. That's up from 45 percent when Marist
[32:16]asked the same question in June, a whopping increase and a sign of how much people are feeling the economic pinch. Yet last night, Trump told Americans how to feel. He gave SNL so much material to
[32:30]work with and he spoke for his accomplishments instead of letting them speak for themselves. I wonder why. It's where we start today with some of our favorite experts and friends, former senior advisor to President Biden and Vice President Harris, former mayor of New Orleans, our friend Mitch Landrieu is
[32:46]here, also joining us, my friend and colleague, senior political analyst, contributing host on Pod Save America and the host of the podcast Runaway Country, Alex Wagner is here. And with me at the table in studio, former Republican Congressman David Jolly of Florida.
[33:01]He is running for governor of Florida as a Democrat. David Jolly, it's nice to see you. What do you think? It's great to be with you. I watched the president's address and I've never been more optimistic that Democrats can now win statewide in the state of Florida. And I mean that for a very specific reason, Nicole.
[33:20]I've now done 140 events since I was probably last with you running for governor of the state of Florida. And we talk about the affordability crisis. The whole world knows we have an affordability crisis largely defined around access to housing, the ability to stay in one's housing, access to health care, the cost of health
[33:36]care, utilities, transportation and so forth. What we saw last night was a president who is completely out of touch, who is creating this gilded presidency so detached from the reality of people on the ground. And I would also suggest that from
[33:51]my experience in the last year, it's far greater than just an affordability crisis. I am convinced, heartbreakingly convinced, that we are at a generational inflection point in the economy where we are losing the middle. The economy is slipping away from people.
[34:04]I think something we've been unable to measure in the past several years is we've already lost upward mobility for a lot of people. This has been a bit of a discovery. You know, look, when Mitch was working with the president and vice president, we could make the case as Joe Biden was leaving office that
[34:19]real wages were going up, inflation was coming down, more people were going to work than ever before, access to housing, retirement security was still at all-time highs, but people didn't feel it. People didn't feel it. There's an anxiety and an anger right now
[34:34]that people's access to housing is slipping away, that the upward mobility is slipping away. People are uncertain about their health care and it is real. It is real and it is crippling people. And what we saw last night was a president who said, "I don't believe you and you
[34:47]shouldn't believe yourself either." When people are desperate, desperately in need of hope, they need someone to offer them hope. He didn't offer hope last night. He told people they were wrong. And when people are looking for hope, they need somebody they can trust. Donald Trump's approval ratings and trust ratings
[35:02]are in the basement at an all-time low. People don't trust him. And so what I saw last night was a president not only disconnected from reality, but the leader of a party that has continued to empower and elevate him in this moment of generational crisis.
[35:17]Look, to put it in raw political terms, there is incredible opportunity for Democrats right now if we respond to this anxiety. But if we put it in historic terms, this is a nation on the brink of some real trouble if that's the current leadership we have.
[35:31]You know, Mitch, I'd like you to pick up on that. I mean, I've been interviewing and covering Trump voters for, I don't know, Alex has too, 10, 11 years. And Trump's wealth was, he was a political unicorn
[35:47]in that he was this incredibly wealthy guy who was crass in a way that made people feel seen for his rebuke of elites and political correctness. But his wealth was alluring. He made it feel contagious.
[36:02]In his second presidency, he has actually gilded the Oval Office. There are on one wall 37 additional gold things. I don't even know what you call them, the doilies and I don't know what you call them things.
[36:18]Not counting the picture frames. And his indifference to not just economic ambition, which is the analysis of how the so-called Manosphere felt drawn to him, but people's economic despair feels like,
[36:38]as David Jolly saying, an epic example of political betrayal from the leader of a party that just got elected on the issue of economic promises. Well, first of all, I think David's comments were on point.
[36:51]I would just mention a couple of things. Not everybody in the country thinks in political terms. The president of the United States is supposed to be the president for everybody. That person is supposed to emote an ethos that makes the country feel good about
[37:07]itself and lifts itself up. And what's so sad and tragic about the address last night is you're watching a guy really, to the extent that he ever had a touch, lose a touch. His fastball's gone. He can't pitch a curveball.
[37:22]He threw a Hail Mary and it just went through the floor. But as we come upon this Christmas season, which for so many people in the country, whether they're people of faith or not, is a time of renewal, of rebirth. And I know David feels this in Florida, because I've traveled
[37:37]the country as well. People are thirsting for us to put aside all the chaos, all the hate, all the corruption, all this stuff that just feels really, really icky. Now it's manifesting itself in people's real
[37:52]need to find some sort of honest security in their economic life, which they don't have. But I agree with David. It's actually falling into a malaise that's much more complicated and difficult. That's going to be hard to come out of. And what the country's thirsting for is a leader that's going to realize that.
[38:07]And that's going to help us come back together. But what they saw last night was just the most banal example of a man that is just delusional, out of touch, just a rampant liar. Not much of what he said was actually
[38:21]accurate at all. In fact, when you fact check this thing, you know that on the day that Joe Biden left office and Donald Trump assumed office, that inflation was at 3%. It had come down from 9%. It wasn't going up.
[38:34]It was going down. Joe Biden was producing 336,000 jobs on average a month. Donald Trump is not. So now inflation's gone up. Cost has gone up. The number of people that are not working is going up.
[38:47]And when you go to tell people how they're supposed to be feeling, and they're experiencing something very different, and you're sitting in a building, which you knocked down half of, but you're building another $400 million building, and you're giving a tax cut
[39:02]to the wealthy, and these people are struggling, you can't get upset that they're going like, look, what the hell is really going on? And you can see it in the numbers because the American people know what time it is. And I think they have displayed that in the polling numbers that we have. But it was just a really a
[39:18]shame. I really feel sorry right now, a sadness. And if it wasn't so tragic and serious, it would almost be laughable. But, you know, we're at an inflection point and we need to decide in this country, Republican, Democrat, progressive, conservative, that we've got to get our feedback
[39:31]underneath us and demand more from the president and of course from the Supreme Court, from the Senate and from Congress to get some stuff done that's going to help the American people. President Trump is now using his White House walk of fame to belittle his predecessors.
[39:48]And many of the nasty swipes emblazoned on formal, metal plaques beneath the portraits were written by Trump himself. They suggest Joe Biden was the worst president in American history. He doesn't even get a photograph. Barack Obama, one of America's most divisive
[40:03]political figures. And Bill Clinton's plaque ends with the fact that Trump beat Clinton's wife in the 2016 election. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski is among the critics, telling NBC News, "I'm really disturbed by that.
[40:17]This is not President Trump's house where he can just say what he wants to say on the property of the people's house." Bill Kristol is back with us. Bill, you know the White House. You work for both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
[40:32]Is Lisa Murkowski right? Yeah, she is right. And when all this stuff at the White House started to happen, including the destruction of the East Wing, just because Trump wanted to build a ballroom, which no one had reviewed, there was no, you know, there was no congressional discussion of it or
[40:46]anything like that. And then all the other things he's done at the White House, all the glitter and gauzy stuff. You know, I thought, OK, I'm upset by it, but I worked there, had the honor of working there for four years, and I live here in the D.C. area. And I know many people who've been there.
[41:01]You know, most people don't care about that stuff. They care about the economy and kitchen table. I've been struck, maybe I'm wrong, but I've been struck talking to people and reading comments at the bulwark and elsewhere. People are offended by this. And I think it's partly that they have a
[41:18]sense that this is the people's house and it's not Trump's personal plaything. Of course, it can be renovated. Things could be changed. The Oval Office could be redecorated in a quarter of the wishes of the president who's going to be working there for four years. But not this kind of petty personal stuff.
[41:31]People don't want that. And there's a sense that this is what he cares about. This is what he's spending his time on. He's the guy who ran. I'm watching out for you. And it turns out all he cares about is building up himself, enriching himself, actually, but also
[41:46]denigrating his predecessors and his opponents. There was a statement from the White House. The press secretary, Caroline Lovett, says the plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each president and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly
[42:01]by the president himself. Look, every presidency has some controversy in it. Unless if you read these plaques, Donald Trump's, which is all laudatory. But I think it's worth saying that the Democratic presidents who are trashed on that
[42:17]wall got more than 300 million combined votes across five elections. People put them there. What else do you think it says about our current president that this is something that he took the time to want to do?
[42:32]I think it's funny that Caroline Lovett thinks it's a plus. Maybe she's just catering to Trump who wants credit for these vulgar and kind of repulsive plaques. But, you know, that Trump personally did it in a way. The normal thing would be to say, well, some over-eager staffer who wanted to build up the
[42:46]president and attack his opponents did it. But, you know, it wasn't really the president's decision. They went the opposite way on this, obviously. But you're right. Look, I mean, these people won a majority. Obama and Biden won a majority of the vote, the few most recent Democratic presidents to win.
[43:00]And Clinton won handy pluralities with Perot preventing from getting a majority. Trump won people who voted for Obama in 2016. Trump won people who voted for Biden in 2024, who voted for Biden in 2020. Otherwise, he wouldn't have won, right?
[43:13]By definition, if you're going to go from the minority party to the majority party, you need to win people who had voted for the other people. Do they really want to hear that the person they voted for? They might not think in retrospect he was as great as they hoped. Do they want to hear that he was worthless and want to see
[43:27]it denigrated? We have such a tradition in this country, and, you know, for better or worse, I think for better, being pretty respectful of former presidents, right? I mean, you see the photos in the Oval Office, they get together, the living presidents, often at the beginning
[43:41]of the next president's term, people from both parties. There's a tradition for major occasions, people will come together, funerals and national tragedies, national celebrations, obviously. Trump's just thrown that all to the wind. Maybe in Trump's America, it doesn't matter.
[43:55]Maybe people like the kind of childish denigrating of your opponents and your predecessors. But I'm not sure that a majority of the American people are there. Bill, if I can just ask you to expand on something you said at the beginning of this, because I spent much less time at the White House than you did,
[44:11]but I was a correspondent there for three years. I never met a single person who worked there when I was there, and I'm talking not just the press, but obviously members of two administrations, or anybody who had worked there previously who didn't feel a certain amount of awe and respect.
[44:27]When you walked into that place every single day, you had that sense of history. You have the sense that it's the center of power in the world. Can you help people understand?
[44:40]I mean, you go there and you do your work, and at some point you're just doing your job, but what is it about being inside there? Well, you're doing your job, and I don't want to exaggerate the sense of grandeur or anything like that.
[44:54]It's a pretty modest actually space in terms of the offices and all that. No, but you have the sense that it's a great privilege to be there, and to be whether whatever, how important, how important what is as a staffer, however non-indispensable one is, it's a privilege
[45:08]to be there. You're going to be there probably just for a few years serving one or two presidents. Same with the media press, I think, as you were saying about yourself. You're going to cover the White House for a few years, but it's an honor to be there, and you don't
[45:22]treat it lightly, I think. President Reagan famously, I believe, didn't take his coat and tie off in the Oval Office, even though he obviously could have. People would put on a coat and tie if they were, as a weekend, maybe they were in there working in their shirt sleeves, if they went into the
[45:35]Oval Office to see him. I think that's an appropriate kind of gesture. Maybe we don't do that anymore post-pandemic quite, but people do, I think, expect a certain amount of dignity and respect for the center of our democratic, republican government.
[45:50]This is not, you know, a court, right? This is not going to Versailles. This is going to a place which is being temporarily lived in and where people are temporarily working in it because the American public put them there. Bill Kristol, it's good to see you.
[46:05]Happy holidays to you.